OIT News Detail

Blackboard 9.1 Upgrade

03/14/2012

St. John Fisher College’s current Blackboard environment is migrating to a cloud solution provided by Blackboard at the end of spring semester 2012. This will allow the College to provide a high availability environment with 99.9% production up time, dedicated IT backroom support through Blackboard, and improved enterprise class disaster recovery capabilities.

At this time, the College is also upgrading to the most current release of Blackboard. Blackboard version 9.1 provides the campus community with a variety of exciting new tools and significant enhancements to the current tools used frequently in courses.

Overall, the upgrade to version 9.1 will allow users to:

Create courses that are more engaging for students

Increase the efficiency of instructors using Blackboard

Allow for greater integration with other tools and technologies currently outside of the Blackboard environment

For example, Blackboard 9.1 will bring improvements to the wiki, blog, and journal tools, as well as improvement to the grade center and new features like interactive rubrics. Users will also see new integrations in 9.1 that allow for mashups with Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, and NBC Learn content directly into their courses, as well as integrations with a variety of Google apps.